September 2024 Update

Hello friends and colleagues,

I hope this email finds you noticing the small joys and wonders scattered throughout your day amid the mundane and the challenges. I’m writing to provide an update on what I’ve been up to professionally lately and to let you know about some clinical and consulting offerings I’ve got coming up. (To not bury the lede: Scroll down for information on an upcoming supervision group I’m starting, as well as a therapeutic reading/discussion group for trans and nonbinary people navigating family estrangement.) Also because I’m me, I’ve included some music at the end as well 🙂 

If you’re receiving this, it’s because you’ve either expressed interest in being updated on my work or I thought you might be interested. Email is one of the most challenging aspects of modern life, and I completely understand if you would rather not receive updates from me in the future. If you scroll to the bottom of this newsletter, there’s a place to easily unsubscribe.

What I’ve Been Up To

As you may know, I launched my private psychotherapy practice in 2021, working (virtually) with clients in Massachusetts and Kansas. This has been a rewarding experience and I’m incredibly grateful to the training I received at Cambridge Health Alliance, both in my internship (including my invaluable time on the Victims of Violence team) and in my two-year postdoc at the Program for Psychotherapy, all of which helped me move into this chapter with competence and confidence. In 2023, I was awarded the Early Career Clinical Practice Award from the Society for Counseling Psychology - an acknowledgment that I cherish (thank you to Dr. Em Matsuno, especially, for their encouragement and letter of recommendation).

Alongside my psychotherapy practice, I’ve continued to work as a researcher, consultant, speaker, and advocate, primarily focusing those efforts on trans mental health, traumatic stress, and the intersection of the two. Some highlights of this work include helping Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts develop their no-cost, low-barrier letter-writing program for referrals to gender-affirming surgery; chairing a symposium on traumatic stress in trans and nonbinary communities at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention; collaborating with academic friends and seeing work I’ve contributed to in print, including a number of textbook chapters I’m particularly proud of; a multi-year project with Joonwoo Lee of UW Madison looking at the impacts of and healing from relational/parental trauma in a group of trans and nonbinary people; receiving a special grant from the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy for research with Drs. Bekah Estevez and Jae Puckett to study effective clinical approaches for working with sociopolitical distress in trans and nonbinary clients; working with a large group of esteemed colleagues to help APA take a definitive stand on the value of gender-affirming healthcare; and a really meaningful experience teaching an in-person 15-hour course on affirming work with trans and nonbinary adolescents and young adults at Cape Cod Institute this past summer.

I’ve also quietly launched a substack for occasional writing, and have published two essays inspired by my reflections on the incredible trans/queer films I Saw the TV Glow and National Anthem. You can read those essays and/or subscribe (for free) here: https://sebastianmbarr.substack.com. I’m finishing up a long piece about the impacts of election-related distress on trans folks and how we can manage this to prevent overwhelm, dysregulation, and burnout. That should be live on the substack this week.

I’ve also started a professional instagram account to help promote some of my work and offerings. You can follow me here: https://www.instagram.com/drsebastianbarr/

What’s Coming Up

I have a few exciting things on the horizon I wanted to alert you to! The first is a 6-session biweekly group for trans and nonbinary people who are navigating family estrangement, meaning they have distanced themselves from family (i.e., low-contact or no-contact) or are working on doing so. 

Family Estrangement Group for Trans and Nonbinary People

The group will be structured around discussion of readings, with space for sharing, processing, and providing/receiving support. The group will run October 29 - January 21 on Tuesday evenings (including an optional alternative holiday gathering on Thursday Dec 26). I’m accepting referrals for folks who can attend virtual sessions from Massachusetts, Kansas, and Florida. (Reach out if you have potential referrals outside of those states. I currently am approaching this as a psychotherapy group so that folks can use out-of-network benefits, but if there is enough demand from states outside of those I can practice in, I might shift the group to allow for more geographic access.) The group flyer is included at the bottom of the email. These are themes that will be explored each week, rooted firmly in a trauma-informed and gender-affirming framework:

• Session 1 - October 29: Our Stories (and Others’ Stories)

• Session 2 - November 12: Social Norms / Models of Families and Estrangement

• Session 3 - November 26:  Why We (Sometimes) Stay Connected to Harmful Family

• Session 4 - December 10: Love (What Is It? What Is It Not? Where Can We Find/Build It?)

• December 26: Optional alternative holiday gathering

• Session 5 - January 7: Grief (What is Lost & Gained When We Distance from Family)

• Session 6 - January 21: (Collectively Imagining Other Pathways to) Belonging, Ancestry, & Identity

I was motivated to develop this group in the context of a number of experiences: first and foremost, my research project with Joonwoo Lee, where an incredibly consistent story from participants is how important (but difficult and nuanced) distancing from harmful family members has been in their healing and development. This is not a surprise to any of us who work with clients who have experienced harm from parents and family, but hearing these histories and pathways to healing over and over again really stuck with me. At the same time, I was approached by an individual who wanted to do focused work around this, and we found that it was really helpful to incorporate stories of others who had had challenging and complicated experiences estranging from or establishing boundaries with family. I began imagining how powerful it would be to do this work as a collective, in a group format, and started exploring potential readings and building the structure I now have. I’ve specifically timed this group to move through the winter holiday period, as this is often a time where people are navigating decisions around distance and/or will experience challenging emotions alongside estrangement. I’m screening potential group members through the end of September or beginning of October, and have limited openings, so please consider sharing this with clients and others soon. Full details about the group are available here: www.drsebastianbarr.com/tnb-estrangement 

Supervision Group

I have long wanted to hold a facilitated supervision group for therapists working with trans and nonbinary clients, as I’ve enjoyed individual consultation and supervision in this area. I’m hoping to launch a monthly group for case consultation this winter. If you haven’t already, please visit my consultation website to sign up for further information about that group! www.transpsychologist.com/sign-up 

Podcast Episode on Managing Election-Related Distress

Earlier this week I recorded a podcast (as a guest) on the topic of election-related distress. This issue is coming up in my personal communities and across nearly all of my clinical work, and as I mentioned I have a substack post coming out in the next week about it. The podcast is TransLash with Imara Jones, an Emmy- and Peabody-winning journalist who was listed in the Time 100 Most Influential People of 2023. I am incredibly honored to have sat down with Imara to talk about the psychosocial impacts of the upcoming election on trans and nonbinary people and how folks can manage their distress around this. I hope this will be helpful to many of us. I’ll follow up when the podcast episode is released, which should be on or around Septebmer 26th!

If you’re a therapist interested in understanding this through more of a clinical lens, Dr. Em Matsuno and I recorded a webinar on this topic in May of 2023. Although the landscape has worsened since then, much of what we talk about in that webinar remains relevant. The webinar is available for free through the Society for Counseling Psychology here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4-U2quD4zk.

Stay Updated On What Comes Next

I’ll be using this newsletter to provide updates on new trainings, writings, clinical offerings, and upcoming events. Feel free to forward this to colleagues, and if you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe for future updates by clicking the subscribe button below. Alternatively if you do not want to receive updates (probably once every month or two at most), there’s a link to unsubscribe at the end of the email. If we haven’t spoken for a while, feel free to email ([email protected]) or text me and say hello! I’d love to hear what you’re up to.

Thank you all for your support and/or community. This is a trying time for many of us (for many reasons), and this is particularly true for those of us in and connected to the trans community. As is true of most (if not all) things, we get through together.

Trans Music!

Okay last thing! When I was preparing for my course this past summer at Cape Cod Institute, there were days I really felt the weight of all the stressors trans and nonbinary young people are unjustly facing. When it got to be too much, I would put on one of my favorite musicians and trans elder, Beverly Glenn-Copeland. His music helped me recenter around the strength and beauty of the trans community and my own trans experience. This practice became so vital to my process that I decided to create a collection of music from trans and nonbinary musicians (or that samples trans an nonbinary musicians, in the case of one song) to share with people taking my course. I will offer that to all of you, as well. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/12H8PcO5cGiWH3DkxByWPE?si=c30248b4a77f47c5. I’ve arranged it in a particular order if you ever want to listen to it all the way through.

And shortly after I drafted this newsletter, an incredible new project was announced. TRANSA is a multi-chapter musical project led by producers Dust Reid and Massima Bell, featuring trans and non-trans musicians from the aforementioned Beverly Glenn-Copeland to Sade, Laura Jane Grace, Sam Smith, the late Sophie, Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, and many more. It is meant to be a celebration of transness and what trans people offer the world. You can read about the project in Rolling Stone and pre-order the 46-track album on Bandcamp.

I hope this music can bring you strength in whatever you’re facing these days. I’ll sign off here and look forward to connecting with you in the future!

Flyer for Group